What happened at Khe Sanh?
The Battle of Khe Sanh was a siege of a US Marine combat base in northwestern South Vietnam, near the Laotian border, by two North Vietnamese divisions. It began with a massive bombardment on 21 January 1968 and lasted 77 days, until the relief operation Pegasus reached the base in early April. The Marines held, supplied entirely by air and protected by one of the heaviest bombing campaigns in history, Operation Niagara. Yet the base was dismantled and abandoned that summer, and whether Hanoi meant to take it or only to draw American attention from the Tet Offensive is still debated.5
For 77 days in early 1968 the world watched Khe Sanh, a lonely Marine base on a plateau in the hills near the Laotian border, ringed by North Vietnamese divisions. News reports compared it with the French disaster at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, and in Washington the president followed the siege on a terrain model in the White House Situation Room. American commanders were determined it would not become a second Dien Bien Phu.6
Part of The greatest battles in American history · Before: The Battle of Ia Drang · Next: The Tet Offensive
The base in the hills
Khe Sanh lay in Quang Tri Province, the northernmost province of South Vietnam, about seven miles from the Laotian border and some fifteen miles south of the Demilitarized Zone, beside Route 9, the road that ran from Laos to the coast. The plateau commanded the infiltration routes coming out of Laos, and it was surrounded by steep, jungle-covered hills.7
US Army Special Forces built an airfield there in 1962 for the Civilian Irregular Defense Group, mostly Bru Montagnards. In 1966 the irregulars moved to a smaller camp at Lang Vei, a few miles to the west on Route 9, and Marines took over the base. Its airstrip, only 3,900 feet long, would become the lifeline of the siege.8
The hill fights of 1967
The first big battle for Khe Sanh came a year earlier. Between 24 April and mid-May 1967, in what became known as the hill fights, two battalions of the 3rd Marines drove North Vietnamese troops of the 325C Division off Hills 861, 881 South and 881 North, the heights that overlooked the base from the northwest. It cost 155 Marines killed and 425 wounded; the North Vietnamese lost an estimated 940 men.9
The trap closes
By the end of 1967 American intelligence was tracking a massive buildup around Khe Sanh. The 325C Division was back, and the 304th, an elite division from the Hanoi area, had crossed in from Laos. The Marine history counts six infantry and two artillery regiments, an estimated 15,000 to 20,000 men, in the hills around the base. On 2 January 1968 a Marine squad killed five North Vietnamese officers scouting near the western end of the airstrip.10
General William Westmoreland, the American commander in Vietnam, chose to reinforce and hold. He and President Lyndon Johnson believed that Khe Sanh was the enemy's main objective, and that the signs of a buildup around the cities were a diversion. The whole 26th Marine Regiment, under Colonel David E. Lownds, was gathered at the base with its supporting artillery, and the 37th ARVN Ranger Battalion arrived on 27 January.11
21 January
On 20 January a North Vietnamese defector warned that an attack was imminent. Shortly after midnight about 300 North Vietnamese troops assaulted Hill 861 and were thrown back. Then, at 5:30 in the morning of 21 January, mortars, artillery and 122mm rockets fell on the main base. A direct hit set off the main ammunition dump, and thousands of rounds went up in a series of explosions that wrecked much of the base above ground.12
The siege had begun. North Vietnamese troops cut Route 9, and from now on everything the base needed, from ammunition to water purification tablets, would have to come in by air. Ten days later, on 31 January, the Tet Offensive broke across the whole of South Vietnam, while some 50,000 American and South Vietnamese troops were tied down defending or supporting Khe Sanh and the other bases along the DMZ.13 › Tet Offensive, 1968
Lang Vei
The heaviest blow fell on the Special Forces camp at Lang Vei, held by about 500 men, American Green Berets and Bru irregulars. Shortly after midnight on 7 February, North Vietnamese infantry of the 304th Division attacked it with Soviet-built PT-76 tanks. The Marine history counts nine tanks breaking through the wire within minutes; the Texas Tech archive counts twelve, five of them knocked out. The camp was overrun before dawn.14
Lownds refused to send a relief force down the road at night, fearing an ambush that would cost him the men he needed to hold the base. In the morning, on Westmoreland's orders, Marine helicopters carried a rescue party in and brought survivors out. About 300 of the 500 defenders, according to the Texas Tech account, came out alive.15
The hills hold
The outposts on the hills took the infantry attacks. Before dawn on 5 February a battalion of the 325C Division broke into the lines of Company E, 2nd Battalion, 26th Marines on Hill 861A; the Marines threw them out in half an hour of hand-to-hand fighting, leaving 109 North Vietnamese dead for seven Marines killed. "It was like watching a World War II movie," said the company commander, Captain Breeding. On 8 February an outpost of the 1st Battalion, 9th Marines was overrun and retaken the same morning, at a cost of 21 Marines killed.16
On 23 February the base took the heaviest shelling of the siege, 1,307 rounds in a single day. Two days later a patrol from Company B, 1st Battalion, 26th Marines walked into an ambush south of the perimeter and was nearly wiped out. On the night of 29 February the North Vietnamese tried three times to break into the lines of the ARVN Rangers on the eastern edge of the base, and three times were stopped short of the wire.17
A waterfall of bombs
What kept the besiegers from closing in was airpower on a scale never seen before. The bombing campaign, Operation Niagara, took its name from the "waterfall" of bombs it poured on the hills. Marine, Air Force and Navy aircraft flew more than 20,000 tactical sorties, and B-52 bombers dropped their loads within a sixth of a mile of the Marine lines, a use of strategic bombers for close support that was considered radical. Westmoreland personally approved the B-52 targets.18
By the end, Niagara had dropped 98,721 tons of bombs, more than the weight of the aircraft carrier Enterprise. A notebook taken from a North Vietnamese soldier described a "storm of bombs and ammunition which eradicated all living creatures and vegetation whatsoever, even those located in caves or in deep underground shelters." Westmoreland later told B-52 crews that what broke the enemy's back "was basically the fire of the B-52s."19
Life under the guns
On the ground the Marines lived in bunkers and trenches, under fire every day. Transport planes landed on the shell-pocked strip and took off again under mortar fire; after a Marine C-130 was hit and destroyed on landing on 10 February, the big transports mostly stopped landing and dropped their cargo instead, by parachute or by pulling pallets out of the hold a few feet above the runway. Helicopters supplied the hill outposts in tightly escorted formations the Marines called the "Super Gaggle." The airlift delivered some 14,000 tons of supplies, and the base's artillery battalion, the 1st Battalion, 13th Marines, fired 158,891 rounds during the battle.20
From late February the North Vietnamese dug trenches toward the wire, sometimes advancing them 200 to 300 meters in a night. But the trenches drew bombs and artillery. Lownds summed up the enemy shelling: "Either they were amazingly inaccurate or we were amazingly lucky."21
Relief: Operation Pegasus
On 1 April the 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile), with Marines and the 3rd ARVN Airborne Task Force, launched Operation Pegasus to reopen Route 9 and relieve the base. The first South Vietnamese paratroopers reached Khe Sanh on 6 April, the 1st Cavalry's 3rd Brigade arrived on 8 April, and the road was declared open on 11 April. On 14 April, Easter Sunday, the Marines of 3rd Battalion, 26th Marines stormed Hill 881 North, and on 15 April Pegasus was declared complete.22
The cost of the siege is counted differently by different sources. For the period from 1 November 1967 to the end of March 1968, the Marines recorded 205 killed and 1,668 wounded, 852 of them evacuated and 816 with minor wounds; Marines killed in aircraft or on the way in and out are not all included. The Marines counted 1,602 North Vietnamese bodies around the perimeter, and American intelligence estimated North Vietnamese dead at 10,000 to 15,000.23
Abandoned
Then the Americans left. In June 1968 Westmoreland handed over command to General Creighton Abrams, and the base was ordered razed. The Marine history records Westmoreland approving the plan; the Texas Tech archive credits Abrams, who argued that the North Vietnamese had changed their tactics and that, with enough troops and helicopters in the region, the Marines could fight a mobile war instead of holding fixed bases. The Marine history's chronology records the base dismantled and abandoned on 23 June; the Texas Tech archive says it had been destroyed and evacuated by 6 July.24
Who besieged whom?
Khe Sanh became one of the most argued-over battles of the war. Westmoreland believed Hanoi wanted a second Dien Bien Phu and had committed too many troops for anything less. Others see the siege as a diversion that pinned down American forces and attention while the Tet Offensive was prepared; a third view holds that the North Vietnamese meant to take the base if they could and to use it as a diversion either way.25 › Battle of Ia Drang, 1965
The Marine Corps's own history, published in 1969, gave "much of the credit for the American success" to the North Vietnamese themselves, and asked: "Who besieged whom?" The abandonment of the base only months after it was held at such cost left that question open.26
